Inmates at Pretoria correctional facility were protesting over parole backlogs
By Ashleigh Furlong
3 July 2017 An inmate at Barberton prison says a hunger strike over parole backlogs started on Sunday. Photo Supplied by inmate.
Violence broke out in Kgosi Mampuru II prison in Pretoria on
Sunday after inmates sentenced to life imprisonment (lifers) staged a
sit-in. Although eligible to be considered for parole they say they have
been ignored.
An inmate at Barberton said lifers at his facility had started a hunger strike yesterday.
According to an inmate at Kgosi Mampuru II there were sit-ins at a number of prisons around the country.
Inmates sentenced to life imprisonment before 1 October 2004 are
eligible to be considered for parole after serving 12 years and 4
months; inmates sentenced after that date have to serve at least 25
years before being considered for parole.
Last week, Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Michael Masutha admitted that there are huge backlogs
in the processing of lifers for parole and that the situation was at
least partly caused by the absence of reports that are needed before an
inmate can be considered for parole.
An inmate at Kgosi Mampuru II told GroundUp that inmates were injured
during the protest on Sunday and that one inmate was taken to hospital.
He said they wanted the minister to address them. He said both lifers
and non-lifers at the prison had refused to go to a workshop on Monday.
GroundUp has also seen an internal communication from the Acting
National Commissioner James Smalberger, dated 23 June, that states:
“Reports have been received about offenders serving life sentences
threatening to cause havoc in correctional centres by embarking in
unlawful activities protesting about them not being considered for
placement on parole.”
The statement says the department is “acutely aware of the backlog”
and that the reason for the backlog is the large reduction in minimum
sentences meaning that many more inmates are eligible to be considered
for parole.
It advises that “heads of centres are requested to address all
affected lifers and explain the causes and remedies for the delays” and
to “urge and warn offenders not to vent their grievances in such a
manner that the order and security of correctional centres are
threatened”.
The Minister’s spokesperson, Logan Maistry, confirmed the Sunday
protest at Kgosi Mampuru II. He said the Department was not aware of any
similar incidents currently taking place at any other correctional
centres in the country.
“According to Kgosi Mampuru II MA officials, it is alleged that
offenders were refusing to go into their cells. They were requested
repeatedly to return to their cells, but refused to do so. The inmates
then started attacking officials, and in the process one official and
one inmate sustained slight injuries. In line with relevant legislation,
minimum force was utilized to restore order and the centre is now back
to normal,” he said.
He said the Department is taking a number of steps to eradicate the
backlogs, including task teams and filling vacancies for social workers
and psychologists whose reports are needed for the parole process.
Published originally on
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.
Skid Row in Los Angeles, a city where rich and poor live in very close proximity – for better and for worse. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters The cities of the Americas are unequal places.
US census data and recent American Community Surveys show that in most modern American metropolises, resources are unevenly distributed across the city – think New York City’s lower Manhattan versus the South Bronx – with residents enjoying unequal access to jobs, transportation and public space.
In 2014, New York City’s GINI inequality index was 0.48, meaning that income distribution was less even in New York City than in the US as a whole (0.39). It was also higher than the most unequal OECD countries, Chile (0.46) and Mexico (0.45).
Between 1950 and 2005, the region’s big cities grew precipitously. Both Mexico City and São Paulo jumped from just under three million people to, in both cases, nearly 19 million.
Data on urban inequality is largely unavailable, but it is clear that this rapid urbanisation has been far from equitable. According to a 2012 UN Habitat report, the large majority of Latin America’s non-poor population lives in major metro areas, while the poorest live in rural areas.
What does inequality look like?
No matter where you live, measuring inequality is tricky, because its incidence and extent changes in different parts of the city.
Sure, there are rich neighbourhoods and poor ones: high-income and low-income households sort themselves across cities according to preference (for local public goods and neighbourhood composition) and needs (according to budget, job location and housing prices).
But not every neighbourhood is comprised fully of households with the same income. Income sorting across space is often “imperfect”, meaning that rich and poor households might live in the same neighbourhood and share common social ties and local amenities.
As a result, a very specific and local kind of inequality emerges within neighbourhoods. This phenomenon is sizeable in US metro areas, Census Bureau data shows. Not only do unequal households live very close together, but neighbourhoods also represent small communities where local inequality, on average, seems to track overall urban inequality.
For example, New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles all have neighbourhood income inequality at least 20% larger than Washington’s, which matches the difference in the cities’ GINI indices. We found that inequality within individual neighbourhoods has also been rising precipitously over the past 35 years (even in very small neighbourhoods), indicating an increase of income heterogeneity at the community level.
This unexpected finding is likely related to the comeback of North American cities over the past decade – the so-called great inversion. Across the Americas, jobs and firms are moving back into major metro areas, attracting more skilled people, who are generally young, receive higher wages and prefer to settle down where their jobs are.
As high-income young couples buy up homes in historically distressed neighbourhoods long dominated by the working and renting class – and gentrify them – they push up income heterogeneity in those places. This is happening in cities across the Americas.
Gentrification has occurred in many North American cities, increasing local income inequality and, in some cases, tensions. Michael Premo/flickr, CC BY-ND
Keeping up with the Joneses
We wanted to better understand this phenomenon. Why is local income inequality rising? How can we quantify it? What are the trends in uber-localised inequality? And what does it all mean for city dwellers?
Those were the questions driving our study – So close yet so unequal: Reconsidering spatial inequality in US cities – which focused on US cities. Our preliminary findings were recently published in a Catholic University of Milan Working Paper.
Unlike traditional assessments of inequality, which accept administrative partitions of the city as the unit of analysis and measure income inequality in those neighbourhoods, we look at inequality among neighbours, putting people at the centre of our analysis.
The underlying thought experiment consists of asking individuals to compare their income with that of neighbours living within a given distance range (from few blocks to entire census areas), thus quantifying income inequality in that particular person’s neighbourhood.
In doing so for every person in a city – any city – one should be able to measure two aspects of spatial inequality: the average income inequality within individual neighbourhoods (is my neighbour richer than me?), and inequality among the average incomes of each neighbourhood (is that neighbourhood richer than mine?).
We found that these two indices define a typology of cities that mirrors what urban planners have found at the city level. Some places are “even cities”. Like Washington DC, they display relatively low income inequality everywhere.
Other metro areas, among them Miami and San Francisco, show high urban inequality, but high and low-income households are rather evenly distributed throughout the city. These are so-called “mixed cities”.
The largest US metro areas also have the most unequal neighbourhoods. In New York and Los Angeles, the way high and low-income households are distributed across the urban footprint reflects what planners call the “unstable city” model.
The Great Gatsby in the ‘hood
Such substantial and increasing inequality appears to imply several contradictory things for cities and their residents.
As shown in Figure 1, lower neighbourhood inequality is associated, on average, with large upward mobility gains for young people who grew up in poor families, a phenomenon reported in recent work by Stanford University’s Raj Chetty.
FIGURE 1: Upward mobility in America’s urban neighbourhoods
Upward mobility gains/losses for children living in poor families in 2000, by Commuting Zone.
Children of better-off families benefit, too, from living in a homogenous local community, thanks to “positive contagion” facilitated by social interaction among wealthy young peers.
Both findings are evidence of a “Great Gatsby Curve” in America’s neighbourhoods. That is, greater income inequality in one generation amplifies the consequences of having rich or poor parents for the economic status of the next generation.
Yet greater income inequality within individual neighbourhoods may actually be a good thing for poorer locals. Figure 2 shows that they experience life expectancy gains, perhaps due to positive health modelling and increased aspirations among poor adult residents.
FIGURE 2: Life expectacy in America’s urban neighbourhoods
, Author provided
Addressing inequality
For policy makers, then, our findings create an intergenerational trade-off. A “mixed city” model would seem to promote life expectancy gains for poor adults who live there, while the “even city” ideal furthers economic mobility of young people who grow up poor.
Lessons learned from such a policy debate in the US could have important international consequences.
No one has yet applied our neighbourhood-based inequality analysis to Latin America’s unequal cities. But we can see that in metropolises such as Mexico City, and São Paulo in Brazil, as well as in smaller cities, uncontrolled sprawl and lack of urban planning has increased the distances between high, middle and low-income households.
The view from the Rocinha favela, in Rio de Janeiro, where ‘urban renewal’ is now encroaching on some of the poorest parts of the city. AHLN/flickr, CC BY
This is the “polarised city” model, and our paper found little evidence of it in US cities (with the exception of Detroit and Washington). Such places have substantial heterogeneity in income across neighbourhoods and relatively little heterogeneity within neighbourhoods.
In Latin America’s polarised cities, the poor are separated from the rest of the population. As a result, they have lower access and opportunities for education, employment and services. This inequality has been exacerbated by gentrification and by the region’s growing global economic engagement. This has strengthened urban elites’ connections to the world while relegating Latin America’s poor further into the periphery.
In such cases, increasing the urban income mix seen in New York City might actually have beneficial effects for the city’s neediest residents. This is a relevant area for future study. It would be interesting, for example, to plot cities across the Americas on the same graph, examining regional trends in longevity and mobility based on neighbourhood-level inequality.
Such hyper-local analysis would offer both policymakers and international agencies the kind of information they need to improve the lives of today’s city dwellers, both now and in the future.
My friend Daniel Sutherland compiled a list of fake news sites -
My updated handy list of fake/satire news sites again. I forgot to add wmcleaks.com
the last time around. Please save the image on your computer or
cellphone. I did see quite a couple of shares from some of these sites
the last 24 hours. Let us distinguish between real news on the one hand
and fake/satire and hate speech propaganda on the other side please.
From protests against President Jacob Zumato children doing
yoga , here are some of the most interesting moments we caught on camera
in the first half of the year
By GroundUp Staff
2 July 2017 Metrorail
services had broken down earlier that day and commuters rebelled. Ashraf
Hendricks / GroundUp
The first half of 2017 has been turbulent. Across the country,
tens of thousands marched against President Jacob Zuma. Lives were lost
in a storm that shook Cape Town. A fire engulfed the Imizamo Yethu
informal settlement. We also lost struggle stalwart Ahmed Kathrada, a
wonderful man of great integrity.
The Western Cape is in the grips of its worst drought in recent
history. There have been many marches and protests – against and for
immigration, over water, electricity, education, housing, shack
demolitions, transport and health-care. Trains and buildings have been
torched.
We haven’t only reported doom and gloom. Our photographers captured
learners attending their first day of school; children experiencing the
joy of yoga on International Meditation Day, and Muslims searching for
the new moon to mark the end of Ramadan. We also met furry friends at
the Mdzananda Animal Clinic, Khayelitsha. A Grade R student cries
after her parents leave during her first day of school at the Isiphiwo
Public Primary in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, on 11 January 2017 - Ashraf
Hendricks / GroundUpA young boy stands outside an abandoned house
in the now ghost town of Dingleton in the Northern Cape on 16 January
2017. Kumba mine has been trying to buy the land, but 25 families have
refused to leave until they receive adequate compensation. - Ashraf
Hendricks / GroundUpElube Mwalwen from Malawi
surveys the damage done to the room she rented in a house that was set
alight during a vigilante attack in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, on 12
February 2017. The community was hit by violence as residents claim
their community is being overrun by drugs and prostitution - Ihsaan
Haffejee / GroundUpThabiso Tshepe sells fruit and vegetables
at his brother’s stand in the Marikana informal settlement in Philippi
East, Cape Town, on 14 February 2017. - Masixole Feni / GroundUpSonwabile Manziwa poses with his dog ‘Danger’ at the Mdzananda Animal Clinic in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, on 21 February 2017 - Masixole Feni / GroundUpPolice isolate a group of protesters
after an anti-immigrant march in Sunnyside, Pretoria, on 24 February
2017. Police arrested the entire group and found drugs on one of them. -
Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpMinister of Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini
appeared before Parliament’s Standing Committee On Public Accounts
(SCOPA) in Parliament’s Old Assembly in Cape Town on 7 March 2017. For
months, the social grants system has been under scrutiny. Dlamini
was asked at SCOPA to explain her department’s actions which flew in
the face of a Constitutional Court order. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA fire engulfed Mandela Park Imizamo Yethu in Hout Bay on 11 March 2017. The fire left two dead and hundreds homeless. - Aletta Harrison / GroundUpReclaim the City supporters
outside an occupation at the Woodstock Hospital in Cape Town on 27
March 2017. Supporters also occupied the Helen Bowden Nurses’ Home in
protest against the private sale of the Tafelberg property in Sea Point.
Reclaim the City said the Tafelberg site should be used for affordable
social housing. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpChildren playing in Elsie’s River, Cape Town, on 28 March 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA woman with a wreath of flowers walks past the casket of Ahmed Kathrada
before the start of the final Muslim prayer at his funeral in Westpark
Cemetery in Johannesburg on 29 March 2017. Kathrada ‘Kathy’ was a South
African anti-apartheid activist and close confidant of Nelson Mandela. -
Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpFibreglass structures in which residents of Komponi in East Londonlive. 4 April, 2017 - Nombulelo Damba-Hendrik / GroundUpCapetonians turned out in numbers on 6 April at Ahmed Kathrada’s memorial at St George’s Cathedral to demand the end of Jacob Zuma’s presidency. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpTens of thousands march to Parliament
demanding the resignation of South African President Jacob Zuma on 7
April 2017. The march was triggered by the axing of finance minister
Pravin Gordhan. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA man protesting against President Jacob Zuma
sits on a sculpture at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Thousands of
people took part in an anti-Zuma demonstration on 12 April 2017. -
Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpCommuters hang on a Khayelitsha-bound train in Cape Town on 20 April 2017 - Mandla Mnyakama / GroundUpThembeka Sam with her three-year-old nephew Mivuyo Patuluko
in Beacon Bay, East London, on 2 May 2017. Patuluko uses a wheelchair
and has epilepsy. He does not speak. When his mother passed away in
2015, his aunt took him in. - Manqulo Nyakombi / GroundUpA man uses a sling shot to launch stones at a police Nyala during a protest in Finetown, Johannesburg, on 10 May 2017. Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpTheewaterskloof Dam in drought stricken Western Cape
on 11 May 2017. At the time this picture was taken, the Western Cape’s
dam levels were at just 21.2%. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpMetro Police Gang and Drug Unit search two young men during an operation in Ravensmead, Cape Town on 15 May 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpResidents protest during a land occupation in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, on 22 May 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUpA resident is seen with a cat that was killed during evictions
in the Bekezela informal settlement in Newtown, Johannesburg, on 2 June
2017. Hundreds of people were forcefully removed and left on the
streets after the Red Ants evicted them from their homes. - Ihsaan
Haffejee / GroundUpA woman navigates her way across a flooded pathway
during a storm in Europa, Gugulethu, Cape Town, on 7 June 2017. At
least five people died and many lost their homes. - Mandla Mnyakama /
GroundUpCoco snuggles up near a brazier
that his owner, Lillian Snyders, made outside her home during winter in
Macassar Village, Cape Town, on 8 June 2017 - Yazeed Kamaldien /
GroundUpResidents block roads with stones and burning tyres
during a protest over a threat to cut off water and electricity in
Davidsonville, Johannesburg, on 12 June 2017. - Ihsaan Haffejee /
GroundUpGrade one pupils stood ready with white roses
which they placed at the Hector Pieterson Memorial during Youth Day
celebrations in Soweto on 16 June 2017. - Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpA youth meditates during International Yoga Day at the Lenasia Cricket Stadium in Johannesburg on 21 June 2017. - Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUpHundreds of Muslims gather in Sea Point, Cape Town to break their fast and to look out for the new moon on 24 June 2017. - Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUp
Published originally on
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.
Reuters
South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC) enters its 2017 policy conference riven and weakened. The five-yearly national event is the precursor to the national elective conference where its policy proposals will be adopted formally.
The party is operating under the weight of concurrent crises. It acknowledges these fleetingly, vaguely and indirectly in nine policy discussion documents that have been prepared for the conference, giving little indication of the unprecedented organisational mess it is in.
The full drama of the party’s capture, collapse or continuation will play out in debates at the conference. But it remains unclear whether or not the various factions will be able to find solutions and compromises that define the party 23 years after it came to power. It is also unclear whether the party can differentiate between the need for far-reaching change or whether it will simply stick to slogans like “radical economic transformation”.
The elephant in the room is whether economic transformation is a policy essential or simply a lifebuoy to protect the party’s embattled president, Jacob Zuma, and his faction. The truth is that the ANC doesn’t have much time to find answers to its organisational battles before its December conference when a new leader will be elected.
The main, interrelated crises that the ANC policy discussion documents relate, in some way or another, are the:
leadership battles that are expressed along deep factional lines, amid suspicions that the president has gone rogue;
communities that have become alienated, and a party that’s reverted to out-of-context liberation and revolution rhetoric to attract “masses” back into its fold;
the predicament created by the fusion of the party with state institutions, and the party infecting the state with its problems, to the point of paralysis, and
a loss of credibility. This is shown by its reaction to allegations of state capture involving undue influence on Zuma, along with the poverty of ideas on how to extricate itself from the crises.
There are some early indications as to how the ANC will emerge from this cauldron. Will it be muddling through, veiled in compromises, or can a “new” ANC emerge?
Dissecting a few aspects of the crises in the context of the policy conference sheds some light.
Irreconcilable factions?
The ANC is at its weakest point ever. Factional fallout is pushing the party to the verge of implosion. The two major factions are allied to President Jacob Zuma and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in the one camp, and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa in the other.
Rightly or wrongly they have become identified with diverging ideological-policy voices. Zuma’s camp is supposed to be more radical, while Cyril’s is viewed, in the phraseology of the Zuma camp, as being more sympathetic to “white monopoly capital”. Ramaphosa’s game comes across as more erudite, playing on policy stability and inclusive growth.
Reading the policy documents raises the question of whether formulations can be found to bridge the factional divides, or whether the losers will simply choose to break away from the party.
This wouldn’t be the first split from the ANC. The first resulted in the breakaway Congress of the People after the ANC’s 2007 conference. Another followed after the 2012 conference and culminated in the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters.
The difference this time is that there’s no clear centre of power that would remain to carry forward the remaining faction.
A spin-off party – at this stage an anti-Zuma ANC looks most likely – could link up with the growing political opposition to defeat the Zuma ANC in the 2019 elections. This would take the cost of another split far beyond anything the ANC had seen before. Hence, the latest thrust for organisational unity.
But even if it could achieve unity, there would still be the issue of how this was translated into policy consensus. Or the tricky issue of what to do about Zuma, state capture, abuse of state corporations and organs for private-factional gain.
The possibility that the ANC could lose power in 2019 runs like a tragic thread through the documents on Strategy and Tactics, and Legislatures and Governance. The ANC acknowledges that its actions have repelled many of its previous supporters. It argues nevertheless that it has retained its liberation movement reputation, that voters believe it has performed, and can be trusted more than other parties.
Possible future electoral losses are noted. The party says it must “prepare itself for the complicated relationships involved in coalition government”.
But the documents concede only superficially that corruption, especially at the top, has tarnished the ANC’s credibility.
The crisis of the ANC’s fusion into state power leaps from the pages that deal with the public institutional landscape and the ANC’s proposals on how to address institutions gone wrong. But the documents simply regurgitate what’s gone before. There is no explicit mention of the problems of the presidency’s powers, or the deep problems of an unprofessional executive that is largely beyond accountability. These are alluded to in vague and abstract terms and are so carefully stated that they might as well be off the radar.
Zuma’s closeness to the Guptas, his friends who are the the centre of state capture claims, is inseparable from these elusive statements.
Is Zuma trying to engineer a collapse of the ANC?
So what happens next? One possibility is that Zuma is preparing simply to collapse the ANC, driving it into the ground on the premise that there can be no ANC without him. This scenario was put to me by an ANC functionary from a so-called “Premier League” – a pro-Zuma faction of leaders of four provinces.
It is perfectly feasible that the outgoing president could tear the ANC apart by letting it split while retaining power, for now, over a faction that cannot win elections and will not find credible coalition partners.
Such hyper-local analysis would offer both policymakers and international agencies the kind of information they need to improve the lives of today’s city dwellers, both now and in the future.
It is perfectly feasible that the outgoing president could tear the ANC apart by letting it split while retaining power, for now, over a faction that cannot win elections and will not find credible coalition partners.